The TVAD Research Group, based in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, researches relationships between text, narrative and image. We publish books, journal articles, host a double-blind peer-reviewed journal, Writing Visual Culture (previously Working Papers on Design) and host events including international conferences.

Monday, 7 August 2017

Earlier this year, Routledge published my monograph on the last radical
architectural group of the 20th century – NATØ, Narrative
Architecture Today. My book, titled NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London, sets out a detailed, contextual history of the group, told through
photographs, drawings, and ephemera. NATØ never built together, so this is an
architectural history without buildings – and I argue that architectural
production is constituted as much by the drawings, texts, models and
exhibitions by architects as it is by built works.

NATØ emerged from the
Architectural Association, where they studied under Nigel Coates. Coates and
his students developed an approach to architecture that drew on fashion, television,
music, video and nightclubs – very much in opposition to the more serious and
inward-looking work happening elsewhere in the school. Indeed, they formed
following the dramatic failure of the cohort by AA external examiners James
Stirling and Ed Jones in 1983, who deemed their work little more than a ‘bunch
of cartoons’. Initially conceived around the production of a magazine, NATØ
went on to produce several exhibitions together, alongside three issues of NATØ, disbanding in 1987 following a
major installation at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art. Their approach
was emphatically against the professional mainstream of architecture, both in
discourse and in terms of practice. They sought an audience in the
fields of fashion and design more broadly, aligning themselves with magazines
such as The Face and iD. Indeed, NATØ aimed to ‘destroy the
notion of the profession’ and ‘travel over the frontier and join the rest
outside architecture’ – envisioning a city made by its inhabitants, without the
top-down imposition of design by professionals. In their ‘apprentice’ character
NATØ described an individual who somewhat ambiguously both discredits and
becomes the professional: ‘From now on none of us, and yet all of us, will be
professionals’. They imagined a street-savvy, creative individual who can make
or alter their surroundings in the same way they would modify or customise
their clothing, self-publish or record their fanzine or punk demo, and weld
furniture from found materials.

Invitation to the first NATØ meeting, from Nigel Coates to Mark Prizeman (1983)

NATØ issues 1-3, magazine covers (1983-85)

Tracing the formation of the
group at the AA, my book examines the evolution of Coates's unit, including his
formative years alongside Bernard Tschumi between 1974-80, before investigating
NATØ's short period of activity between 1983-87 across the media of drawing,
publishing and exhibiting. I had access to a fascinating body of archival
material from the period, held primarily in the private collections of the NATØ
members, which is published for the first time in my book. The book is
structured around these three core outputs – examining first the drawings, then
the magazines and finally the installations. Through the analysis of these
archival materials, the book explores NATØ’s preoccupation with narrative,
drawing terms and definitions from narratology into architectural discourse for
the first time to develop a new vocabulary of architectural narrativity.

Part of the importance in
telling the story of NATØ is the restoration of a more complete account of
postmodernism, with the book reinstating one of the many contours of the
inherently multifaceted field. The bookcontributes to the growing body of
literature that is recuperating postmodernism from the often-reductive discourses
that pervade writing on architecture. My contemporary re-reading of postmodernism through NATØ's work avoids the
simplifying definitions of architectural postmodernism that have focused on the
stylised, two-dimensional modes of pastiche historicism. Instead, NATØ’s
provides a case study of architectural postmodernism that prioritised the
pleasure and creative potential of the complex and chaotic, avoiding reduction
to surface decoration in favour of rich, narrativised experience.

Finally, the book also describes a specific urban milieu: 1980s London.
Contextualising NATØ’s work from a spatial, social, political and cultural
perspective, I align the group with the street subcultures of the period,
discovering parallels between their approach and the work of contemporaneous
filmmakers, graphic designers, product designers and fashion designers working
in London. Indeed, the specific state of post-industrialising London and its
urban decay forms an integral part of understanding the work of both NATØ and
their contemporaries – an idea I expand upon in the book.

I will be building on some of the ideas developed in the book in my
paper ‘DIY and disorder: NATØ’s approach
to making and materiality’for the Design History Society Conference at the University of Oslo in September 2017. In
March 2018, my TVAD Talk will explore the work of product designers including
Ron Arad, Tom Dixon’s Creative Salvage group and Daniel Weil whose work echoes
many of NATØ’s preoccupations.

Dr. Claire Jamieson is lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies for BA Architecture and BA Interior Architecture and Design at University of Hertfordshire.

Friday, 28 July 2017

Reversing the Polarity of the Gender Flow: on reactions to Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor

Ivan Phillips

There has been no shortage of opinions in
the days since the announcement
of Jodie Whittaker’s casting as the 13th lead actor in the BBC’s
science fiction drama Doctor Who.
However people have responded to the imminent arrival of the first female
Doctor, one thing is clear: it has got them excited,
in the truest sense of the word, with few remaining entirely neutral on the subject.

Overall, the reaction
has been enthusiastic, with parents posting tales of ecstatic daughters, the
previously Who-phobic suddenly
deciding that they are going to tune in, and the majority of fans welcoming either
a sharply appropriate piece of casting (the best actor for the job), a long-overdue
redressing of the balance (at last, a woman) or a necessarily radical shake-up
of the format (a change is better than a rest). Nervousness among some, however,
has escalated into profound and toxic fury among a minority. At the limits of
negative opinion, there were ad hominem attacks,
plangent howls of disbelief and a TARDIS-load of bad old-fashioned chauvinism.
The angry bottom line for the savagely righteous and the frankly appalled seems
to have been a belief, a gut instinct perhaps, that a 54-year-old institution
had been destroyed in a moment of SJW madness.

Not surprisingly, some of the most vitriolic
resistance could be traced to those with a culturally conservative agenda, whether
professional media goblin Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) – who jibed about the
Doctor going on maternity leave - or US evangelicals like James Huckabee
(@Hucksworld): ‘#DoctorWho died today. He didn’t die nobly as you might expect.
He was murdered by Political Correctness.’ At times, the bitter aggression of
those reacting against the news was terrifying in its barely-suppressed misogyny.
‘Not really a DW fan,’ raved Felix Ulrich (@BlackParagon), ‘but female DW can
suck my D ffs – stupid ideology bullshit infesting everything’.

Given the ferocity of such outbursts, it seems
glib to reach for the no-publicity-is-bad-publicity argument but the revelation
of Peter Capaldi’s successor has certainly generated discussion in a way that
hasn’t been seen since the announcement in September
2003 that Doctor Who was to be resurrected
by Russell T. Davies after years in the museum of TV relics. Despite Capaldi’s often
astonishing performances, ratings
have fallen over the last three years, as have sales of the all-important
merchandise, and a cynic might be tempted to see the casting of a female Doctor
as a last-ditch, all-or-nothing, kill-or-cure publicity stunt on the part of
the BBC. The temptation is to be resisted, though, because it reduces a complex
cultural moment to a petulant tabloid spasm, doing a disservice to all involved,
and to the richness of the Doctor Who mythology
itself.

Accusations of ‘political correctness’,
whether ‘gone mad’ or otherwise, are really too lazy to dignify with a
response. There have been enough critiques of Doctor Who’s inherent conservatism over the years – from John
Fiske in the early 1980s to Lorna
Jowett more recently – to justify a suspicion that, even if it did simply respond
to the dreaded feminist-liberal-lefty agenda, Whittaker’s casting would still
be a very correct correction. As it happens, my own view is that Doctor Who has never been as reactionary
or paternalistic as its reputation suggests – indeed, I feel that it embodies
what Paul
Ricoeur identifies as myth’s ability to be ‘the
bearer of other, possible worlds’. Does
the fact that, until Christmas Day 2017, the main character will always have been
played by a white man, pose a problem to this reading of Doctor Who as a radical imaginative utopia? Well, yes, of course it
does. It is worth remembering, though, as many have in the last week or so,
that the first producer of Doctor Who
in 1963 was a 27-year-old woman called Verity Lambert and that the first director was a gay Asian man, Waris
Hussein, also in his twenties. It has been
pointed out, too, that Sidney Newman, the Canadian TV pioneer who probably has a better claim
than anyone to be the originator of Doctor
Who, commented in 1986 that the lead character should one day be played by
a woman. So much for any PC betrayal of the show’s heritage…

In an ideal world, the casting of
Whittaker would not have caused any kind of fuss, whether appreciative or censorious.
Or, at least, it would have caused no more of a fuss than any previous casting
of the Doctor, since there is always a period of unease, resistance,
questioning, excitement, nostalgia, hope and fear. In an ideal world,
Whittaker’s gender would not be an issue in the context of her successful
audition for what she has called ‘the
ultimate character’. But this is not an ideal world, which is why a
narrative like Doctor Who – on
television, in novels, in comics, in games, in fan fiction, and in millions of
playgrounds around the world – is needed, to be one of those fantastical bearers
of other, possible worlds. The current distance from the ideal (and who am I to
say that it is the definite article?) can be measured not only by the extremes of joy and
despair that have greeted the casting of Whittaker, but also by the ugliness of
some of the events that have occurred. The prurience and shabby moral hypocrisy
of tabloid newspapers publishing decontextualised nude stills from the actor’s
previous screen roles, for example. Then there was the sorry spectacle of the 5th
and 6th Doctors, Peter Davison and Colin Baker, being pitched
against each other as representatives
of the anti- and pro-Whittaker camps respectively. Again, context was
everything and, again, context was lost, leading to Davison – a generous and
tireless ambassador for Doctor Who for over 30 years – being trolled
off Twitter.

Davison’s concern that boy’s might have
lost a role model was widely reported – ‘If I feel any doubts about it, it’s
the loss of a role model for boys’ (note the ‘if’) – but his enthusiasm for
Whittaker was less prominent: ‘I understand the argument that you’ve got to
open it up, so she has my best wishes and full confidence, I’m sure she’ll do a
wonderful job.’ Colin Baker was surely right to argue that a role model is not
intrinsically tied to gender – how many boys growing up in the 1990s had Buffy as an icon? – but Davison’s mild qualms that a non-violent,
cerebral hero-figure for non-violent, cerebral boys might be slipping from view
was not, in its qualified context, entirely unreasonable. Even so, those
non-violent, cerebral boys (and men) will now discover that a female Doctor can
be just as fantastic at saving the universe as a male Doctor. A female Doctor a
bit like their mum, or their sister, or their girlfriend, or their wife. Or,
come to think of it, their teacher, their pilot, their doctor…

A recent story in the Daily Mail reports the ‘news’ of
Whittaker shopping
for groceries in ripped jeans:
‘She will be expected to smarten up when she emerges from the TARDIS.’ This is
to bring her in line, presumably, with those sartorially elegant Doctors played
by, say, Patrick Troughton and Christopher Eccleston (both shown above). Such
ludicrous journalism gives an indication of why the casting of Whittaker is a
risk for the series, although the risk has nothing to do with the quality or
gender of the lead actor. Nor is to do with the sanctity of the canon (the
canon, in this case, being a remarkably flexible thing) or the supposed volatility
of fans (who, as Miles
Booy recognises, have sometimes
loved the series ‘in monstrous ways’). It is to do with the concurrent inertia
and sensationalism of the surrounding culture, a temporal paradox if ever there
was one. Outgoing show-runner Steven Moffat, speaking
at San Diego Comic Con last week, was
surely right to insist that the ‘backlash’ against a female Doctor was largely
a media invention: ‘so many people want to pretend there’s a problem – there
isn’t.’ Moffat, who has received a lot of criticism (some of it justified) for
his depiction of female characters during his time in charge of the show,
should be credited with establishing the groundwork for Whittaker’s Doctor in
his casting of Michelle Gomez as Missy, a brilliantly witty female incarnation of the Master, and
in his shaping of Capaldi’s final season. ‘Is the future going
to be all girl?’ sneered John Simm’s
Master in the recent finale, ‘The Doctor Falls’, to which our hero retorted:
‘We can only hope.’

As many have pointed out over the last
fortnight, Doctor Who is a fiction, a
story, with a modern mythic protagonist who – like Frankenstein’s Creature,
Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple – will always be bigger than the actor who
plays the part. (And, for the record, I see no reason why Holmes should not be
played by a woman or Marple by a man, or either of them by a transgender or
nonbinary actor: qualities of imaginative vision, writing and performance are
the keys here, not predetermined gender categories.) Doctor Who is a fiction, a story, but it is a mistake to think of
it as only a fiction, only a story: there is no only about it. Fictions are acts of
make-believe but that does not mean that they are not real. They tell stories
that have a reality – that reality
of ‘poetic faith’ described by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge 200
years ago – that is
fundamental to the experience of being human. Whether gritty realism or
extraordinary fantasy, the stories we tell are always, ultimately, about
ourselves. As Matt Smith’s Doctor said to a sleeping Amelia Pond in 2010’s ‘The
Big Bang’: ‘We’re all stories in
the end. Just make it a good one, eh?’

This is why the casting of Jodie
Whittaker as the Doctor – and the reactions to her casting – are so important. They
extend the story, and they challenge it. If, in the process, as Jonn
Elledge has suggested, ‘the right people’
become agitated, then that is a price worth paying and a gain to be made for
the mythology. As Doctor Who writer
Paul Cornell tweeted on the day of the casting announcement: ‘This is what Doctor
Who has always been there to do.This is
what Doctor Who is *for*.’

Jodie Whittaker understands this aspect
of the show when she
comments that ‘Doctor Who represents everything that’s exciting about change’.
She, along with Chris Chibnall (and let it be said, Steven Moffat), has seen
the future and it works; the past and the present too, as Capaldi’s festive
swansong, ‘Twice
Upon A Time’, promises to show.
The Doctor Who story will continue to
be a good one – in the view of this writer, one of the very best.

Ivan Phillips is Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire